The Verge has an interesting article about the new lighting techniques that Pixar used to render Monsters University, which opened this weekend and is at the top of the box office chart.

Pixar has a long history of building new software between projects (most recently overhauling its rendering software for Brave), but in the run-up to Monsters University, the changes cut particularly deep. As planning kicked in, director of photography Jean-Claude Kalache announced he wanted to change how light worked at Pixar.

"What if we made these lights just work?" Kalache told The Verge, in a Jobsian turn of phrase. Instead of building reflections and shadows manually, why not do it automatically every time an artist placed a light source? "It was as if every time you took a photograph, you built a new camera," Kalache says. "It takes away from the art of taking a picture. We wanted to stop being engineers and be artists." The result was Global Illumination, the lighting system getting its first public debut on Thursday with Monsters University.

Click the Read link below to view the full article.

Pixar is arguably the best animation group from both a storytelling and technical achievement perspective. Sure, not all of their movies have been to my liking, but overall, they have the best track record of any studio/group that I can think of.

Have You Seen Monsters University?

What did you think of the graphics in the movie? Are they any better than other recent Pixar movies, like Brave?

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